Media Monitor – A daily brief and valuable research tool
Our team researches search daily for relevant police and criminal justice content links to news, opinion, analysis and reports from third party sources including local, national and specialist press as well from key police and criminal justice organisations. The researchers tag each post in detail creating a searchable database of over 32,000 links. Use the search filters to return results by keyword/phrase, date, content type, subject, police force and media source and export the results to a PDF report with live links. It’s also a great way to search for Policing Insight content which is also featured.

Weekly Academic Research Summary
This weekly summary curates the key policing-related research that’s been published online each week, with links to the original journal articles, and selected abstracts – plus a short guide outlining how serving police officers and staff can get access, free, to many of the articles listed through the National Police Library. You do not need to be a member of the College to access its library. Click here to view over 150 summary articles

The Police Student Series articles:

THE POLICE STUDENT: Your introduction to Evidence-Based Policing
What is Evidence-Based Policing (EBP) and why is the College of Policing keen to incorporate this approach into police work? To coincide with the announcement of our forthcoming series, THE POLICE STUDENT, Policing Insight’s Academic Editor Carina O’Reilly explores the shift towards Evidence-Based Policing and the value it potentially brings.

THE POLICE STUDENT: The drivers of evidence-based policing
THE POLICE STUDENT: In the first of our new series aimed at supporting the new police degree entry recruits, Policing Insight’s Academic Editor Carina O’Reilly explores the different policing approaches and the drivers for the shift towards Evidence-Based Policing (EBP).

THE POLICE STUDENT: Approaches to Evidence Based Policing: 1. What Works?
In our continuing series aimed at supporting the new police degree entry recruits, Policing Insight’s Academic Editor Carina O’Reilly delves deeper into Evidence-Based Policing (EBP) in the context of ‘what works’.

The Police Student Content Schedule

This first tranche of articles will focus on one element of Evidence-Based Policing – from the meaning of the term, and its development over the last decades, to why the College of Policing has embedded the use of research evidence into the PEQF curriculum.

Topics will range from the research available on policing hotspots, and situational crime prevention, to the emerging evidence around body-worn video and other cutting edge technology.

We will also look at the difficulties involved in assessing research evidence in policing work – and why it’s so hard to embed the use of evidence in police organisations. All of these speak directly to elements of the College of Policing’s Policing Education Qualifications Framework (PEQF) curriculum, and will help students – and the officers supervising them – understand these key topics and develop their assignments.

The content for year one will focus on the following areas:

• Crime science and the development of Evidence Based Policing (EBP)
• Targeting, testing and tracking: The experimental approach
• What is evidence? The debate
• Policing models: SARA, Problem-orientated policing, Problem-solving in neighbourhood policing
• What works? Rational choice theory, routine activity theory, and situational crime prevention
• The development of police professionalisation
• Hotspots and place-based prevention
• Body Worn Video
• Individual-focused strategies
• Neighbourhood-based interventions
• Implementation problems and how to spot them
• Embedding EBP in organisations
• Overcoming obstacles to evidence-based policing

Students can supplement the core articles with relevant articles and reports from Policing Insight’s large archive which features over 500 contributors from policing and criminal justice including from police, government, academia, third sector and industry in the UK and around the world. Please use the search box at the top of the page.

Students may also find the Weekly Academic Research article series useful for sign posting the latest police and criminal justice research published.

For a wider and deeper knowledge base, students should use the Media Monitor service which has over 32,000 links to articles and reports from Policing Insight and 3rd party sources. This huge resource can be searched using filters by keyword, date range, content type, subject, police force and media source. 

Our researchers have searched the web you don’t have to eg a search on Media Monitor using the tag ‘body worn video’ return several hundred articles and reports that are very relevant whereas the same Google search will require sifting through thousands of irrelevant results to find useful content. 

Create your own reports/briefs by exporting the search results to PDF report with live URL links.

‘The Police Student’ page will be a hub for information on the series with all the articles highlighted here as they are published.

Be sure to sign up for Policing Insight’s weekly newsletter and social media channels to keep up with the latest content as it’s published.

Series Author of The Police Student

Carina O’Reilly is Academic Editor of Policing Insight, and also a policing academic at Anglia Ruskin University, where she is Course Leader for the Policing and Criminal Justice degree and the MA in Contemporary Policing. Carina leads the Evidence-Based Policing modules delivered as part of ARU’s policing portfolio, and has been heavily involved in curriculum development for the new pre-join degrees. Her research is focused on neighbourhood policing and community engagement.